Inform and empower yourself

In order to organize the best cancer care and the best access to cancer care worldwide we need to significantly change and speed up the processes in cancer research and care. We simply cannot accept the fact that about 10 million people die of cancer each year. The good news? We as citizens can do something about it and get cancer under control. On this page we give you information and suggestions on what you can do. We focus on the issues with impact, like:

Change the way science works

Inform yourself: check the excellent talk of Adrien Treuille at the Sage Bionetworks congres 2012 about a new look at science from the crowd. Crowdwisdom.

Empower yourself: when you are in a trial, ask your researcher if he or she could open up the data and models used in the trial one year after the start, instead of keeping them to him- or herself and only publishing the results after a couple of years. That way, many more researchers can work on improving the models, speeding up the process and we have lots of more data to work with, which makes for better quality of research. After all, it is your data.

Inform yourself: check the excellent talk of Lawrence Lessing at the Sage Bionetworks congres 2012 about how money rules congres and how the Medical Industrial Complex works. In politics the only dependency that is allowed is on the people, the voter. In medical science and healthcare the only dependency that is allowed is on the citizen, the patient.

Get health literate

Inform yourself: make yourself an expert on your disease. For instance, many radiologists do not know the relevant medical studies, or maybe they do not want to know. A typical CT scan has 100 times the radiation of a chest X-ray, or more, depending on where and how it is done. A CT study with several scans can expose a patient to the radiation dose of the average Hiroshima survivor who was about 2 miles from Ground Zero (source: professor Gerd Gigerenzer, ‘Risk Savvy’).